From a point of view of protection of a driver and/or a passenger in a car, an air bag apparatus which is a passenger protection apparatus has conventionally widely been used. The air bag apparatus is equipped for the purpose of protecting a driver and/or a passenger against shock caused at the time of collision of a vehicle, and it receives a body of a driver or a passenger with an air bag serving as a cushion, as the air bag is expanded and developed instantaneously at the time of collision of the vehicle.
The gas generator is equipment which is incorporated in this air bag apparatus, an igniter therein being ignited in response to power feed through a control unit at the time of collision of a vehicle to thereby burn a gas generating agent with flame caused by the igniter and instantaneously generate a large amount of gas, and thus expands and develops an air bag. The air bag apparatus is equipped, for example, in a steering wheel, an instrument panel, or the like of a car.
An attempt to fix an igniter to a housing through insert molding of a resin material as a source material has recently been made for a gas generator, from a point of view of reduction in weight and facilitation of manufacturing. Specifically, such a structure has been studied that, for example, a cylindrical lower shell with bottom having an opening formed in a bottom plate portion is fabricated by press-working one plate-shaped member made of metal, an igniter is arranged to pass through the opening, and a resin molding is formed by feeding an insulating fluid resin material into a space between the igniter and the lower shell and solidifying the resin material, so that the igniter is fixed to the lower shell with the formed resin molding.
Documents disclosing such a structure includes, for example, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2001-165600 (PTD 1), Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2008-49941 (PTD 2), Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2010-173559 (PTD 3), and Japanese National Patent Publication No. 2012-504073 (PTD 4).